The present invention relates to a user interface for effectively displaying posts on a computer screen. More specifically, the present invention relates to a mechanism with which posts continually transmitted from other computers are multilaterally displayed along axes on a computer screen according to a user's input or select operations, and the displayed posts are switched in real time.
Information transmission in the form of “murmurs” or “tweets” has been popular. This is done with a communication tool such that a loose connection is generated from each user posting a short phrase (e.g., text data within 140 characters) with monologic content, and such a communication tool has also become prevailing as corporation services. One such representative service is called “Twitter®” (Japan registration No. 5188811).
A unique uniform resource locator (URL) is assigned to each user's post. In each user's personal site or “home” (typically application software running on a computer operated by the user), the user's posts and posts of users previously “followed” by the user are displayed in a scrolling manner on a computer screen in a chronological sequence called a “timeline.”
Compared to technologies such as blogging, this communication tool is characterized by a highly real-time nature and allows loose communications that may be triggered even by a post of casual asking, for example, “What's happening?”
However, in such cases as using this communication tool to participate in an open forum or an event, the more the user is following other users, the more posts are transmitted and displayed on the computer screen at a time. It is difficult to pick up the flow (situation or trend) of communications from the numerous posts.
This is even more difficult particularly when a number of topics or themes from a number of tweeters are mixed in posts that proceed in real time. This prevents effective feedback for establishing communications as timely “tweets.”
In this respect, a tweeter, who is an information-transmitting user, may specify, for his “tweets” (posts), keywords predefined for topics. If such specification has been made, a user who is following the tweets of the tweeter may be able to take an approach of narrowing down the posts to only necessary posts according to the keywords. However, the narrowed-down result cannot be further narrowed down.
Also, “tweets” with no specified keyword cannot be narrowed down in the first place. As a real-time process, it is often the case in a daily conversation that a keyword forming a topic gradually shifts or suddenly changes. To establish natural and loose communications, such changes should be allowed, and the user is required to flexibly address such changes.
In the light of the above, there is a significant meaning in enabling a following user to multilaterally analyze posts in real time.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-46394 describes a system in which operation instructions written in a natural language are interpreted on a part-of-speech level to perform multidimensional analysis.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2009-193133 describes a system in which a user's single statement is analyzed to present information such as an advertisement related to the statement. However, the system does not perform analysis across several statements.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-252797 describes the following: information about an axis used for analysis by a first analyzer is stored along with a keyword, so that subsequent analyzers can enter the keyword to use the analysis axis information. However, the system is essentially effective only within the range of the analysis axis to be analyzed.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-316766 describes readily constructing a multidimensional DB system by a user interactively selecting a format according to a sample structure (a scenario for analysis) provided in advance for each purpose of use. However, the system only sets the multidimensional DB analysis model based on an existing structure.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-303213 describes a system for automatically defining a dimension model based on an interrelationship of a relational schema. However, the system defines a dimension based on the interrelationship of the relational schema but does not define a dimension for analysis based on data stored in a single table.